


A Breath Too Many

by oneturianwoman (sakuramae)



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mass Effect 3, Near Death, No Shepard Without Vakarian, Post-Mass Effect 3, Renegade Shepard (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22036051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakuramae/pseuds/oneturianwoman
Summary: Commander Shepard gasped.It was a short one, almost as though it was elicited from some organic teetering between life and death. A snake's death rattle. A swan's last song. The intake of breath that would release to nothingness.
Relationships: Female Shepard & Garrus Vakarian, Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian, Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Comments: 3
Kudos: 44





	A Breath Too Many

**Author's Note:**

> This does take place post-ME3 so SPOILERS GALORE.
> 
> This fic was one of my retrospective thoughts of how ME3 could definitely go instead. I wrote this some years back, and I haven't fixed it since, so...apologies for any errors?

Death didn't hurt.

It had been a promise of peace. An end to the constant worry and stress and guilt that skyrocketed to insurmountable levels during the three years she'd fought, tooth and nail and biotics against the Reapers. It was time to rest. She had done her part, after all.

Victory at all costs was the turian saying.

 _"I'll sleep when I'm dead."_ She'd said that once.

The process of _dying_ wasn't even that painful. If she had to rate it on one of those pain threshold scales Dr. Chakwas always set her up with, she'd say it was a low to middling 4. Maybe a 5 for the fact that the pain couldn't be pinpointed, that her entire body was a vessel of pain and agony and it was _dying_. Slowly dying, and there was no likelihood of survival. Not this second time.

She'd put aside her pain, dismissed it. She was ready to die, and when she did, every throb, every thrum, every piece of broken body would stop sending signals to her head. She'd be free.

No, death didn't hurt. Dying, not so much either.

Breathing with a punctured lung, on the other hand, hurt a _hell of a lot_.

Commander Shepard gasped.

It was a short one, almost as though it was elicited from some organic teetering between life and death. A snake's death rattle. A swan's last song. The intake of breath that would release to nothingness.

Shepard gasped again, her breath strong enough to carry air in and out. A short breath lasting hardly a second, yet feeling like an eternity.

 _Why the hell am I not dead_ , she thought. For someone who had been at the heart of the Reapers' destruction, she was surprised she hadn't instantly died. It should have happened that way, she got her job done and knew that getting out of her suicidal mission was a Hail Mary short of succeeding. Not that she believed in a religion, but Christ, why the hell was she still even thinking and breathing and contemplating the slowness of her perishing strength?

Thinking hurt worse than breathing. It was the thinking that did her in. Made her gasp again.

She thought about the Normandy, about where it would have landed if it survived the fight.

She thought about Joker and whether or not he would forgive her in the end for what she'd done to synthetic life. For what she'd done to EDI.

She thought about Admiral Hackett and the Alliance fleet, about her mother who had been promoted to Rear Admiral during the war. She thought about the navy and all of those people that would live to fight another day, that would live to replace fighting with rebuilding.

She thought about Earth, about the restoration that would follow soon. Perhaps it was happening now and she didn't know it.

She thought about the rest of the galaxy and its inhabitants, about the alien species and whether they would focus rebuilding their worlds, too.

She thought about Palaven and whether it would remain militant even when the war was over. It probably would. The turians would not be turians if they didn't prepare themselves for the next battle.

She thought about the one turian who was foremost in all of her thinking, hoping against hope that he'd recover from the wound he'd taken on the field.

She thought about his scarred face twisting with anguish, right before she ordered his evacuation from London.

 _"And you've got to be kidding me,"_ he'd stammered then, voice breaking.

Her voice had broken, too, splintered as badly as her thrumming heart. Crushed and yet set aside for the mission. He _knew_ it was what she would do. He would have done it in her place, but _she_ was Commander Shepard. And she had outranked him on her ship. On her team. He had no choice. She'd forced him to retreat. Forced him to hear her say she loved him even as she left him.

The expression on his face remained in her thoughts as she lay there dying. Another breath, another thought.

Gravelly voice taking purchase near her ear, breath on her cheek. Hands pressed against her waist, warm and comforting despite the hindrance of armor between them. Eyes that spoke in volumes, of surety and doubt, of bravery in the face of danger, of fear for losing a loved one. For losing her. A mouth that quirked to a smile, the scars on his right cheek making him look even more attractive. For a turian, in any case.

Shepard liked his scars. Shepard _loved_ all of him.

 _"There is no Shepard without Vakarian,"_ she'd said before the mission in London. She remembered meaning it. Remembered the spoken and unspoken words between them as she crushed her lips to his one final time.

The idea that she'd never see that scarred son-of-a-varren's face again sent her into a complete, inexpressible agony.

Shepard gasped, and she knew it was one breath too many.

She pushed the rubble up. Groped to level herself to a sitting position.

Everything _hurt_. Everything was broken. She couldn't be sure that she was alive, but damn it all to hell, if death didn't come for her soon, she was by no means going to wait around for it in this shithole.

The shithole that happened to be London, England, Earth. She rasped another breath, tried to turn her head.

Moving was a feat, and she still wasn't sure how she'd managed. Several ribs must have been broken, her lung collapsing in on herself. One leg limp, the other mangled beyond help. One arm broken, the other--the one with her omni-tool--had been protected enough that she could still function. Her omni-tool, on the other hand, was utterly destroyed.

She felt her face, grimaced at the burn marks she sustained. Scars that had finally started to heal a distant memory. She would have new scars now. Scars that she didn't think would be easily healed.

Should she survive long enough. That was still open for debate.

She almost crawled out of the rubble, but even that was too pedantic for her. Commander Shepard did not crawl. If she was still alive, then damn it, she was going to _walk_ out of that rubble. Or limp out of it, she wheezed, looking at her busted leg.

The pain was acute now. Agonizing and pronounced. She had every urge to lie back down, to succumb to the growing need to rest. But the brief thought of yielding to death was punctured by another breath. And another.

And she kept breathing, even as she tried to crest the hill of rubble.

There was noise ahead. And had she not been so preoccupied with the pain on her side and her legs and her lungs, the pain on her face and her shoulders and her thighs, then she would have seen the ship, too.

Would have seen the soldiers flanking her from behind and to the side.

Would have seen the ship land in the far distance, a smaller transport pod shooting across in a speed she could not fathom.

But when she finally did stop to notice, the only thing she saw was the turian atop the hill.

The one turian who had been foremost on her mind.

He was still too far off, but she knew the expression that would be on his face. It would have mirrored her own.

His mouth moved, and Shepard was sure he'd said "Spirits…" and then, perhaps in a lower voice, one she could imagine hearing in her mind, "Shepard."

What she _did_ hear was his eventual bellowing for a medic. Several medics. He had turned away from her, his arms waving at the people behind him--people she couldn't see from where she stood. When he turned back to her, he'd started his descent. No, not started. Quickened. He had already been moving toward her.

Moving so quickly, so haphazardly. Forgetting that there were other people there. Forgetting that he had gotten injured, that the Medi-gels would soon stop working, that he'd need his own medic by the end of his climb down.

It hurt like hell to watch him run to her. It hurt like hell to think that he was right there, standing with hope in his face. Hope that she'd live through this after all. Hope that he wasn't imagining her, just as she had hoped she wasn't imagining him. That she wasn't imagining any of this.

Her _body_ hurt like hell, and death would certainly have been a welcome friend. All she had to do to end the pain was to lie down and stop moving.

She stumbled forward instead, toward the turian. Toward Garrus. Toward pain. Toward life.


End file.
